Release Notes

Help

Release 56 - May 29 2020

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

This week we have a few updates to let you know about.

Recommended Reading As you may have noticed we’ve begun rolling out a new Recommended Reading widget that appears at the bottom of threads. This is powered by machine learning and is designed to surface threads and topics you may be interested in.

It’s not live on all sites yet, so if you don’t see it, it will be rolled out on your favorite forum soon!

Of note, it includes a one-question survey, asking you if the results shown are helpful to you. Regardless of your answer, we’d appreciate it if you could fill this out!

Premium Membership Reminder Our Premium Membership option has been a bit hit since we launched it a few months back, so we want make sure everyone is aware of its benefits.

For more info click the “Upgrade to Premium” button on the right side widget or in the menu under their avatar.

Coming Soon! We can’t say too much yet, but we’ll be rolling out some updates to the home page in the near future that should greatly improve the experience.

As always, thanks for sharing your passions,

Your Community Support Team

Release 55 - May 19 2020

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

You may have noticed we’ve been pretty silent lately. That’s because we’ve been busy.

This week we have a few updates to let you know about.

Image Bug We’re excited to announce that a pesky bug has been squashed. As some of you may have noticed, images in sections only available to logged-in members sometimes didn’t show. This was due to a Cloudflare resizing function and we’re happy to report it’s no longer an issue.

Pushy Push Notifications Improving our popular push notifications feature, we’ve made an update that allows those of you who don’t want to receive notifications, and who don’t want to be asked about it ever again, to permanently deactivate them. Just click the “never” button.

Spam We haven’t talked much about the updates to our spam filters lately, but we’ve made numerous changes to vastly reduce the amount of spam on the sites. We’ll continue to test new settings and tools to win the war on spam.

Coming Soon! The Community Management team will soon be reaching out as we look to recruit more moderators to help manage some of our communities. We plan to start this process in June but if you just can’t wait, click the Contact Us button at the bottom of the site and send us a note to volunteer.

As always, thanks for sharing your passions and stay safe out there!

Your Community Support Team

Release 49 - April 07 2020

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

Our focus on performance and spam fighting continues this week.

Performance Optimizations As previously mentioned, monitoring and making updates as necessary to strive for optimal performance is an ongoing process. We have seen good results on sites where database updates have been made and will continue rolling out database updates to more sites gradually during overnight hours.

Spam Fighting Last week we reviewed how spam attacks typically come in waves and how we are combating some recent waves of spam attempts. This week, we continue to make changes to existing spam controls and monitor the results closely. We will be implementing changes across more sites this week to further combat the spam attacks some sites are seeing.

Please reach out with any questions or feedback.

Your Community Support Team

Release 48 - March 31 2020

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

This week we have a few updates to let you know about.

FAQ Updates We’ve updated our site FAQs to provide more information about site functions and features. Members can access site FAQs by clicking the three dots in the top right corner and then FAQ.

Here you’ll find answers to burning questions such as how to find account settings, how to switch between dark and light mode and how to become a Premium Member. Check it out!

Performance Optimizations As previously mentioned, monitoring and making updates as necessary to strive for optimal performance is an ongoing process. We have seen good results on sites where database updates have been made and will continue rolling out database updates to more sites gradually during overnight hours.

Bug Fixes We’ve addressed two bugs this week. One is related to images not displaying under certain conditions. The other bug fix addressed an issue when a member cannot resubmit their credit card information after a failed attempt.

Spam Fighting Similar to performance monitoring, fighting spam is an ongoing process. Spam attacks typically come in waves where some spammers succeed in getting around existing anti-spam controls. When this happens, we investigate and make changes to existing controls or implement new anti-spam tools. Then, we monitor closely to determine if further changes are needed.

This week, we have updated anti-spam control settings on some sites that have seen an increase in spam attempts recently. Once we determine these changes are on the right track to combat this recent wave of spam, we will implement those changes across other sites.

As always, please reach out if you have questions or feedback about your community experience. We love hearing from our members.

Your Community Support Team

Release 47 - March 24 2020

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

Continuous improvements are core to bringing you a reliable and increasingly better site with every update. Here are some updates we have for the latest release this week.

Spam Prevention We’ve made some updates to our reCAPTCHA services during sign-up to make it tougher on bots. This service helps protect the platform from spam and abuse, while letting valid users pass through with ease.

More Performance Optimization We are constantly testing new ways to improve our performance and the speed of the site. Your feedback and experiences help us to diagnose any issues and deliver improvements. We have continued to rollout database updates to improve speed and reliability on the platform.

Please continue to send us your feedback. Your insights are extremely powerful in helping us to support your community better.

Your Community Support Team

Release 46 - March 17 2020

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

This week we have a few updates to let you know about.

Visual Improvements & Performance Optimization We have fixed the spacing in the General Info and Modification Info sections on some sites to be more visually appealing. We also continue database upgrades on sites each evening to address performance issues. When a site is scheduled for that upgrade, we activate a notification on the site to let members know. For those sites that have already been upgraded, we have seen improvements in performance statistics, which is great news. Thank you for your patience as we work through those updates.

Bug Squashed This week our team released a fix for a bug that allowed members to purchase multiple Premium Membership subscriptions under certain conditions. Although we appreciate the support, one purchase per site is all that will be allowed.

As many of us find ourselves spending more time at home due to events taking place in the world, we are so thankful for the technology that connects us all. We hope you continue to connect in your communities, and are sharing knowledge on the things you love. We are always looking for ways to improve your community experience. Please let us know if you have concerns, suggestions or feedback.

Your Community Support Team

Release 45 - March 10 2020

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

This week we have some visual improvements and bug fixes up for release.

Visual Improvements We’ve corrected a spacing issue where page numbers didn’t have enough space between each number. We have also updated some title headings to be consistent across the site. And lastly, we corrected a typo for the word “showcase” in the Account Preference page.

Bug Fixes We’ve resolved a few bugs this week as well. First up is an issue where the Trending section of the homepage sometimes displayed no content. We’ve also corrected an issue that required a member to verify their email address after an admin approves their account registration. And finally, when a forum has many sub-forums, we changed to a drop down menu to allow a scrollable area with a fixed height.

Performance Updates Continue As mentioned last week, nightly database updates will continue across the environment to improve speed and reliability for sites. These updates will take place during slower traffic times and a notification will be set alerting members before the maintenance window starts. Thanks again for your patience as we continue our focus on improving performance.

Don’t hesitate to let us know your thoughts on how the site is functioning, features you’d like to see, or any other feedback you have.

Your Community Support Team

Release 44 - March 03 2020

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

Visual Improvements This week we have a couple of updates that you may notice. We completed a visual overhaul on the conversation landing page. Also, we updated the subforum description displayed in the right column to no longer be truncated.

Performance Updates Performance monitoring is done on an ongoing basis to strive for a fast, stable browsing experience for members. We have included some small changes in Release 44, but will also be applying some database updates across our environment over the next several weeks. Sites will see an additional maintenance period that will last a bit longer than the usual Tuesday maintenance period for new releases. These maintenance periods should last less than one hour and will be targeted for lower traffic times for each site.

As always, creating an enjoyable community experience for you is our priority. Please continue letting us know your thoughts. It is greatly appreciated.

Your Community Support Team

Release 43 - Feb 26 2020

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

This week we have a few performance enhancements, a couple of bugs squashed and a new feature to announce.

Bugs Fixes & Performance Enhancement This week we’ve made some enhancements to search performance, fixed an issue where searching less than three words sometimes returns no results and fixed the site logo when sharing to Facebook or Twitter.

Premium Membership has Arrived We are excited to announce an updated version of our Premium Membership is now available. We’re introducing it as a way for members to give back to their communities -- as all proceeds go to re-investing in this platform -- and to improve their site experience. Our site is ad-supported, but many people don’t like to see ads. A Premium Membership is a way to improve their time on the site and give them exclusive access to some features. The site will continue to be supported by ads, so the site will continue to be free to use (with ads) for people who are not interested in the Premium Membership.

The price is $19.99 USD, billed annually. We currently only support the USD currency, however people can still purchase the membership wherever they are in the world. We support PayPal payments, along with Visa, Mastercard, American Express & Discover. The features of Premium Membership are:

A reduced ad site experience (banner ads are removed)

Focused reading mode (the option to hide the right column)

Access to exclusive forums

An exclusive badge on profile avatars

Members can unsubscribe from these automatic payments at any time. Members who cancel will retain their Premium Membership until one year from the date of their sign up.

Members can find information about Premium Membership by clicking “Upgrade to Premium” in the right side widget or in the menu under their avatar. Members can also find purchase options in their Account Settings under Account Details or Account Upgrades.

Previously, some communities had Lifetime Memberships available to members. These members will now have the Premium Membership experience (and will receive those benefits for their lifetime). New Lifetime Memberships are no longer available on the new platform. For any user who already has a Premium Membership, and they paid more than the new $19.99 USD price, we are messaging them to let them know the steps they should take to make sure their renewal happens at the new rate.

We’ll continue to focus on site performance and and feature enhancements to improve your community experience. Please continue letting us know your feedback as we go along.

Your Community Support Team

Release 42 - Feb 19 2020

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

This is your weekly update to let you know what’s new for your community.

Visual improvements & Bug Fixes We’ve made some updates to how some things look. There has been a small change to how conversations are viewed. The number of showcases shown per page has been increased to 35.

On the bug front, we fixed an issue where sometimes editing an old post would generate an error related to only being able to apply 5 tags to that post. And we’ve also resolved an issue with avatars blurring when a member navigates to a new page.

Sync release numbers You might notice this release appears to jump ahead into the future to 42. In addition to being the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything, it’s also the current internal release number our developers use. To simplify, we’ve updated the public release number to be in sync with our internal release number. These will remain in sync from now on.

Coming Soon! There are more updates coming to improve site speed and we’ll be releasing a new Premium Membership experience within the next week or two. Please keep an eye on release notes to find out the latest information on those and other features released. We appreciate your input and look forward to hearing from you!

Your Community Support Team

Release 35 - Feb 12 2020

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

We’ve got a couple of updates to let you know about this week’s release.

Visual Fixes and Improvements We’ve made some small visual updates to buttons and input fields in dark mode. This should improve viewability for those who prefer the dark mode experience.

We've also made some visual tweaks to prefix tags and have added a new tool tip for user badges.

Image Resizing We've made some changes to how images are resized. This optimization will reduce the file size of an image by compressing and resizing it, without compromising the quality of the image. This fix should help improve the site's speed and performance.

Push Notification We havefixed an issue where notification prompt still occurs after clicking “not now”

Timestamp Format Time stamp format is now shortened:

2 days ago → 2 d ago

13 hours ago → 13 h ago

10 minutes ago → 10 m ago

5 months ago → 5 mo ago

Topical Profile Info You can now add specific information to personalize your profile. This information will be easy to see and share underneath your avatar in posts. You can find out more in your profile settings.

Coming Soon! There are more updates coming to improve site speed. Please keep an eye on release notes to find out the latest information on those and other features released. We appreciate your input and look forward to hearing more!

Your Community Support Team

Release 34 - Feb 04 2020

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

This week we have a few updates to let you know about.

Password Reset by Username If you’ve ever forgotten which email address is connected to your account, it can be a real challenge to figure out where a password reset email has been sent. But not any more! Now, members will have the ability to enter their username or their email address when requesting a password reset. After entering a username, a message confirming that an email has been sent will be shown. For privacy, the full email address will not be displayed.

This will help members get back to posting in their favorite community after a password reset.

Visual Polish We’ve made some small visual updates to the header avatar and how gallery images are displayed.

Advanced Search Yes, there are more updates this week to the evolving Advanced Search feature. We’ve made changes to the search button and popup, the Search Date input and the toggle between “Most Recent” and “Most Relevant”. We will continue to make updates as needed to make searching fast and easy so you can find the important information you need.

Thanks to our members, we have received amazing feedback allowing us to know what’s important to you, what you think works well and where you would like to see new features and improvements. We appreciate those who have taken the time to share their thoughts. Keep them coming! Your voice matters!

Your Community Support Team

Release 33 - Jan 28 2020

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

We’ve got a couple of updates to let you know about for this week’s release.

Advanced Search We’ve made an update to make search easier to use. Now, clicking the Search button without entering anything in the search field input will take the member to the advanced search page.

Moved Discussion Threads We’ve also made a change to how moved threads behave to ensure that members can always find a thread that may have been moved.

After a thread is moved, the old URL of the thread will exist permanently and anyone who accesses the old link will automatically be redirected to the new URL. The visible link in the forum where the discussion was originally posted will be visible for up to 30 days, as determined by the moderator team.

Dark Mode And finally, we’ve applied some polish to dark mode to improve overall color and contrast. This should improve viewability for those who prefer the dark mode experience.

That wraps up progress for this week. Keep an eye out for some exciting updates coming within the next couple of months.

Your Community Support Team

Release 32 - Jan 22 2020

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

We have some exciting updates for you this week regarding search, alerts & notifications and a few cosmetic changes to some views.

Advanced Search As we continue to evolve the Advanced Search feature, you can now search using exact match, must include and must exclude terms to help you find the information you need faster. Use quotation marks for an exact match, a plus sign for must include and a minus sign for must exclude.

Push Notifications Last week we mentioned sites will now support allowing push notifications from a member’s web browser. We will start rolling this feature out to sites throughout the next couple of weeks.

Once released to a site, members can navigate to Account Settings, then Preferences, where they can enable push notifications and edit other notification settings.

Alerts We’ve also made a change to how long alerts are visible. Previously, unviewed alerts would clear after 30 days and viewed alerts would clear after 4 days. We heard from members that wish to have alerts visible for a longer period of time. Now, both viewed and unviewed alerts will be cleared after 90 days.

Various Updates to How Things Look You may notice some slight changes on some views for better alignment for content and user profile information. We’ve also made a change on the thread listing page. We’ve increased the number of threads per page from 20 to 35, so members can see more threads in one page.

Whew, that was a busy week, but we aren’t done yet.

Admin Control Panel We have some exciting news for site administrators! We will be rolling out our Admin Control Panel (ACP) this week! Once access is granted, an administrator will see an “Admin” link in the upper right corner for the Admin Control Panel. Just a reminder: 2 Factor Authentication must be enabled before accessing the Admin Control Panel.

Admins will find frequently asked questions for the ACP in the Help section of the site. Click the three-dot menu button next to the avatar, then click on FAQ.

Help FAQs can also be found by scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking Help.

As always, please continue to let us know your thoughts and feedback. It’s what drives change and helps us prioritize new features.

Your Community Support Team

Release 31 - Jan 14 2020

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

This week we have a few updates to let you know about.

Two Factor Authentication To increase security related to logging in, members can set up 2-factor authentication in their Account Settings on the Password and security tab. This ensures that logins for an account use another step to authenticate if the device being used is not recognized. Members can set up a second authentication method, such as email or a separate authentication app. This is especially important for those with higher-level permission access, like Administrators. As we get closer to releasing a new Admin Control Panel (ACP) view, those with administrator level permissions will be prompted to set up 2 factor authentication before they can access the new ACP.

Coming Soon! Push Notifications Coming soon - members will be able to allow push notifications in their browser, so they can keep up to date on the latest activity on the site:

Once released to all sites, members can navigate to Account Settings, then Preferences, where they can enable push notifications and edit other notification settings.

Various Bug Fixes We’ve also resolved a few bugs, specifically one related to contextual search not searching properly and another related to images not displaying properly. There was also an update made to some mobile views to align icons a bit better.

Even More Coming Soon Premium Membership is still on track to be released within the next few weeks and as previously mentioned, a new Admin Control Panel view for Administrators is on the horizon as well. Please keep an eye on release notes to find out the latest information on those and other features released.

Release 30 - Jan 08 2020

Our first release of the new year contains a couple of exciting updates.

Editing Posts The new edit limits feature includes unlimited editing of new posts - fix that typo or add more details as often as you like, within 24 hours of posting.

To summarize how editing works, members have unlimited editing of new posts for the first 24 hours after posting. Up to 10 existing posts (older than 24 hours) may be edited per week. More editing will be allowed as each of those 10 edits expires every 7 days.

Improved Search We are excited to introduce more search functionality to help members find the information they need faster and easier. Now, you can search the entire site or narrow down to a specific forum or discussion that you are currently viewing.

As always, each release includes squashing a bug or two and performance improvements behind the scenes.

We appreciate the feedback we receive from our members and look forward to bringing more features and improvements in the coming year. From the entire Community Support team, we wish you a happy and healthy 2020.

Your Community Support Team

Release 29 - Dec 31 2019

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

As we approach the end of the year, we have a few updates to announce.

Restyling of Action Buttons We’ve done some restyling of the action buttons on a post to make it less visually cluttered. We’ve also moved the Report function to the three dot overflow action button.

Edit Limits Updated We’ve heard a lot of feedback on editing limits on posts, especially older posts that may contain outdated information. Because of that, we’ve made some changes to editing permissions. Members now have unlimited edit permissions for up to 10 discussion posts, 10 showcase posts and 10 gallery posts per week. That will allow those who wish to update a project thread, correct a typo or update event information to do so, even if the post is from months ago.

As always, moderating team members will have access to edit as they always have.

Members can access the edit function on their own posts by clicking the three dot action button next to the timestamp on their post.

We also fixed a few bugs, updated some CSS and made some background performance enhancements.

Coming soon! As previously mentioned, the new Premium Membership experience will be coming after the first of the year. Work continues behind the scenes for that feature. Work is also in progress to improve notifications. Stay tuned for those changes in the coming weeks.

On behalf of the entire team, we wish you all a happy and healthy New Year.

Your Community Support Team

Release 28 - Dec 17 2019

Hello community members & moderators,

As we approach the holidays, we have a couple of updates to let you know about.

Updates to Userbit Information We’ve made a few visual changes to how user information is displayed on profiles. We’ve moved the badge shield to the right, to prevent any blocking of the member’s chosen avatar image. We’ve also moved the “online” green dot indicator before the member’s username. This should help make the member’s online status indicator a bit more intuitive and visible.

Embedded Image Thumbnails We’ve also made an update to ensure thumbnails are displayed for embedded images. Various performance tweaks and behind the scenes work took place, as well.

Premium Membership is Coming In the new year, we look forward to bringing Premium Membership to our new platform. This has been mentioned in a few updates and the team is making great progress. Stay tuned for more information on that feature in future release notes.

Happy Holidays! We appreciate the contributions each member makes to the community. The entire Community Support team wishes each and every member a very happy, peaceful and enjoyable holiday.

Your Community Support Team

Release 27 - Dec 02 2019

Hello community members & moderators,

We’ve had a busy week. Here are the updates we’ve made.

Find FAQs Faster First, we’ve made it more intuitive and easier to find help when you need it. The site FAQs link is now displayed on the ellipse menu (the three dots next to your avatar). Click the ellipse menu and then click FAQ. Tada!

Profile Rollover Redesign Next, we’ve spent some time redesigning the profile rollover. We’ve made the colors a bit easier on the eyes, cleaned up some duplicate information and improved the spacing on that view. This should make it easier to see what is important (and look a bit prettier, too). It’s also more clear how to follow or message a member. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Page Loading & Bug Smashing We’ve also made some updates to how pages load, which will continue to improve speed, getting you the information you need faster.

And finally, we’ve smashed a few bugs, including one impacting animated gifs that didn’t want to animate.

We look forward to hearing your input as we continue to provide community updates each week!

Your Community Support Team

Release 26 - Nov 19 2019

Community Members and Moderators,

Hello! This week, we have two exciting changes to announce.

Avatars

We’ve received quite a lot of feedback regarding avatars. Avatars are a great way to let other members know a little bit about each other. As a result, we have updated avatars to display in a square shape, rather than round and made the size of the avatar a bit bigger. This will better display some of the interesting photos our members select to represent themselves in their community.

Search results

Next, as we continue to build and expand search functionality, we have updated search to display up to 500 results. We will continue to monitor performance and feedback as our search technology evolves, to make it easier to find important information you want!

General Housekeeping

We’ve also done some general housekeeping, removing some no longer needed code, squashed a few bugs and made some improvements in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, for inquiring minds) for faster page loading.

Check out those changes and keep the feedback coming. We appreciate hearing your thoughts!

Your Community Support Team

Release 25 - Nov 12 2019

Community Members and Moderators,

This past week, while we have been developing some bigger feature improvements for you, we have also tidied up a little. Effort spent on fixing a broken link here and there, better scrolling, and as always, improving site speed - just makes the community work better for everyone.

Coming Soon!

Avatars & Avatar Badging We know how important it is to showcase your passions and interests to the community so we are working on updating avatars and badging.

Based on your feedback and ongoing collaboration, we will roll out several improvements starting next week to accommodate a wider variety of image sizes and enlarge the profile picture. We look forward to hearing your input as we continue to provide community updates each week! Keep the feedback coming….

Your Community Support Team

Release 24 - Nov 04 2019

Community Members and Moderators,

We have a few updates this week to share as well as progress reports on new features!

Search Performance

Several performance enhancements have been done to search indexing to improve the speed of showing results.

We are also actively working on showing more results per keyword search. Additional results will be released in the next couple of weeks.

More Coming Soon!

Profile Rollovers

We have added some additional information to your user bit within posts but we are also improving your profile rollover. This is all about you! This space highlights who you are to the community and makes it easier to meet fellow members.

We look forward to hearing your input as we continue to provide platform updates week to week!

Your Community Support Team

Release 23 - Oct 29 2019

Community Members,

We have a couple of exciting and new things to present for platform improvement updates this week.

Image File Size Increased

The file size for images has been increased to 20MB, which should allow members to upload images more easily without having to resize them. Make your showcase shine and post those beautiful pictures for all to see!

New Navigation - Roll out

For some of you that visit your community every day, you may notice a difference in the navigation to new posts and the forum list page. We wanted to make them faster and easier to find. This is still rolling out to all sites over the next couple of weeks. Let us know what you think of the design and functionality!

Performance Enhancements

Behind the scenes work continues to improve search functionality and lay the groundwork for other features in the coming weeks.

Coming Soon!

Avatars

We will be implementing larger avatars on desktop view very soon, which will better showcase those images you choose to represent you.

Premium Membership

Members who wish to contribute to the community by becoming a Premium Member will have easier access to the Premium Membership feature in the upcoming month. Stay tuned for more information.

Thanks again for your continued feedback and engagement with our new platform. We appreciate your input and look forward to hearing more.

Your Community Support Team

Release 22 - Oct 22 2019

Community Members,

A summary for you on the platform improvement updates for this week.

Member Location - Country

Communities are all about connections. To help this, we have launched country flags for your member information within posts. Find members closer to you, ask about hard to get models or products outside your borders or make a new buddy from far away!

Setting Your Location

Click on your avatar, near the upper right-hand corner of the site. Select account settings from the drop-down menu.

On the account settings page, scroll down to location.

As you start typing your city, it will offer you choices appear in the drop-down menu. Click to select on the one that displays your location.

If you prefer to only display your state, simply type your state, and then click on it in the drop-down menu.

Within discussion threads, you will see your country flag displayed under your username.

Performance

Ongoing performance improvements help the site continue to run smoothly. That just makes sense for everyone!

More Coming Soon!

Avatars

We have listened to your feedback about your avatars! We will be implementing larger avatars on the desktop view very soon.

Premium Membership

Many of you are already existing and past premium members and we thank you for your commitment to the site and community. For those of you interested in joining our premium club, we will be rolling out easier access to this feature in the upcoming month.

Thanks again for your continued feedback and engagement with our new platform. We hope you have enjoyed these regular improvements.

Your Community Support Team

Release 21 - Oct 8 2019

Community Members,

We wanted to reach out to all of you and provide an update on new features, fixes, and improvements to your community platform.

Tapatalk Fix

We appreciate your patience as we have been working in concert with the Tapatalk team to improve the uploading and experience with images on mobile devices. We have launched a fix today that should address any remaining intermittent issues. The solution is optimized for the latest software, please upgrade to the most recent version of the Tapatalk app. Let us know if the experience is working better for you!

User Location - Upcoming

It’s easier to connect with your fellow community members if you know where they are coming from, literally! We are improving the appearance of your country of origin within your profile details in the discussion threads. This is expected to launch in the upcoming week.

New Posts - Upcoming

We have heard your feedback and understand that you want to get to new posts even faster! In the next 2 weeks we are testing new navigational designs that aim to make this easier for you.

Thanks,

Your Community Support Team

Release 20 - Oct 01 2019

Community Members,

We would like to highlight two new feature improvements with this week’s release.

Badging

We appreciate all our community members and guests. Some of you have taken on additional roles as site moderators, premium members, and sponsoring businesses. As an acknowledgment of your efforts, you are identified now through member badges on your avatar. This should help your fellow community members find and recognize you more easily!

Premium and Lifetime Premium members have a star and circle around their avatar.

Vendors have a storefront at the bottom of their avatars

Premium Vendors have a storefront and circle around their avatar.

Our community staff members are identified by the lightning bolt at the bottom of their avatars.

Premium staff members have a lighting bolt and a circle around their avatar.

Compact Layout

Thank you for all the feedback on the layout and placement of the content. In an effort to reduce scrolling and make the design slightly more compact, we have made some adjustments. You’ve probably already noticed! Now, this can be tricky to get right for everyone but we hope this helps you navigate the site easier and faster.

Thanks,

Your Community Support Team

Release 19 - Sep 24 2019

Community Members & Moderators,

We would like to announce two feature improvements launching this week, based on our collaboration with our members.

Jump to Forum

Once you are done reading a discussion thread, we have made it easier to get the full forum listing from a handy menu at the bottom of the page. We hope this helps you get where you want to go...only faster!

Advanced Search Filters

Thank you for all the feedback and insights on how you are using or want to use search within your community. We have introduced advanced search filters by recency, by forum and by thread. As we need to index additional content within the site for our AI powered search algorithm (www.vespa.ai ), this may take a few days to display on the site. We are looking forward to your feedback and thank you for your patience!

If you are new to using Advanced Search filters, there is a “How To” guide listed below.

Thanks,

Your Community Support Team

How To Access Advanced Search

If you have already entered your search words in the search bar but want to narrow down your results or choose to search only certain forum selections, click on “Advanced Search”.

This will allow you to choose to search titles only, add the member username who posted it or even select a specific forum to search from the scroll menu within search in forums.

If you prefer to go directly to advanced search, you can access it under the 3 vertical dots at the top right-hand corner of the community.

Release 18 - Sep 17 2019

Hi All,

Easier and faster multi-quote feature is here! Please review the how-to below and let us know what you think.

Thanks,

Your Community Support Team

How To Multi-Quote

Step 1: Click the multi-quote icon at the bottom of each post that you want to quote.

Step 2: Scroll down to the text editor where you are going to write your post. Click "Insert Quotes".

Step 3: A small window will pop up for you to verify (or delete) quoted content that will be added to your post. Click "Quote messages".

Final Step: The quoted content will automatically be added to the text editor. Add your comments and click to post your reply.

Added Notes: You can multi-quote from more than one discussion thread in the forum. You can also simply highlight the part of the text you want to quote. A Small popup will allow you to choose the multi-quote option using just the selected content.

Release 17 - Sep 11 2019

Hi All Community Members and Staff,

Reaching out to those who like to use a Desktop and wide-screen monitor - this one’s for you! We have introduced support for a wider screen experience over 1600 pixels to bring more content up higher on the screen and take advantage of the extra space. We hope you enjoy the view!

Multi-quote & Advanced Search

Both of these are in development now with our engineering team. We are looking forward to delivering them to you in the upcoming weeks.

Please continue to provide us feedback - the insights have been really helpful and are appreciated!

Release 16 - Sep 06 2019

Hi All Community Members and Staff,

We would like to announce some improvements and progress based on community feedback and in-thread comments. We appreciate your patience and willingness to work with us.

Last Poster is Back

You wanted to see the last member to post in a discussion. It is important and we heard you. Your discussion listings have been updated. We hope this makes it easier to find the topics that are most interesting to you.

Tapatalk

We have updated the Tapatalk plugin, which should resolve an issue with images posted by Android Tapatalk being visible through browsers. We are also actively working with Tapatalk support to iron out bugs related to using the app and an issue with Android Tapatalk users being able to view some images. We also encourage all to keep their Tapatalk app up-to-date and on the latest version so all software can play nice together!

COMING SOON!

An update on some of the additional features and improvements that members have been providing feedback on.

Widescreen

You like big monitors! The site has been adapted to bring more of the content up higher on the page and wider to accommodate the extra pixels. We expect this to be delivered in 1-2 weeks.

Multi-quote

Wanna quote lots of great content in your posts? We have made that easier and you can expect that to launch in the next 1-2 weeks as well.

Advanced Search

We are a few weeks away from delivery on advanced search but development is in progress. We are utilizing www.vespa.ai to make search even better and more powerful for the community now and into the future.

If you have more questions, please let us know in the ‘We Are Now Live Community Feedback’ discussion thread. There are more improvements still to come, based on your feedback and collaboration. We will sign off for now and let you get back to your community!

Release 15 - Aug 22 2019

Aug 22, 2019 - New Signature Options!

All Community Members and Staff,

Personalizing your experience and telling the community more about yourself is an important part of being a member here. We have heard your feedback on having more options with text and images in your signature. We are happy to announce that those improvements are here!

Below are some additional details on how to make your signature all about YOU! We’ve also included some instructions on personalizing your display of the site to show or hide signatures, depending on your preferences. We look forward to your feedback and launching more features and improvements in the weeks to come!

Signature Options

Your signature can include up to 4 lines, a maximum of 1000 characters and one link Anytime you hit "enter" on your keyboard, it will automatically go to a new line

You can include images but an image also counts as a line

Images will automatically be resized to 300 x 200 pixels to optimize display across all screen types

You can see more options in your settings to collapse signatures, always view full signature, or to not see signatures at all. The choice is yours.

Fun fact: Both guests and members can view signatures, however, members have more options!

If a member has their preferences set to the default they will see collapsed signatures as in the example below for them. (They can click to see more.)

If a user has their preferences set to always show expanded signatures it will look like the example below for them. Your image can be clicked to view full size.

If you want to adjust your preferences for signatures you can click on your avatar near the upper right-hand corner of the site and select account settings.

In the left side navigation, you will see an option for preferences. Click it.

Scroll down to content options and select your signature preferences.

If you have more questions, please let us know in the ‘We Are Now Live Community Feedback’ discussion thread. Thank you again for all your help and collaboration in making this community better each day.

Your Community Support Team

Release 14 - Aug 19 2019

Hi All Staff & Community Members,

There are a diverse set of members and guests that are active within your community. We welcome all kinds of voices and want to ensure that this site is a place to share opinions in a safe and appropriate way, especially for visitors under the age of 18 years. As such, we have introduced a filter for sensitive images that may not be appropriate for a younger audience or those who choose not to view certain types of image content.

VIEW IMAGE CONTENT

As a guest or member who wants to view one image at a time, you can always click to "Show Content". Again, this provides a way for all members to engage and participate in the community.

As a member, if you would like to view all image content at any time, you can go to your account settings preferences to adjust. We hope this makes the community more active and welcome for all.

Release 13 - Aug 13 2019

Hi All Community Members and Staff,

We would like to tell you about improvements that are not quite ready yet but are coming soon! As you have already heard us say numerous times now, we are truly listening to your feedback. As active community members, you know what key features are important to enable your participation and engagement in the community. There are a few key items that are continually coming up as more immediate priorities for you. While this is not the entire list, we did want to share updates in the following areas.

Advanced Search Options:

Our development team is actively working on developing an advanced search feature that will better help find exactly what you are looking for. This is a priority for all of us.

We’ve also heard that searching within threads and forums is critical as well as being able to filter by date and thread title. While there are more search functions that can be added, we want to work towards delivering you better Search as soon as possible. Let us know if we are on the right track.

Signatures:

Personalizing your experience is an important part of being a member here. We have heard your feedback on having more options with text and images in your signature. We are launching a solution in the next couple of weeks to allow for this. We hope you like it!

Display on Wider Screens:

The designers are actively making adjustments to accommodate for wider monitors and higher resolutions. As this will affect the display of the site, there is some complexity around the changes to ensure it still works well on ALL devices. We appreciate your patience here and look forward to delivering this improvement very soon.

Showing Locations:

This community is a great way to bring together people from all parts of the globe. We have heard many times that there is interest to show your member location more prominently near your avatar. We are working on a better way to achieve this. In the meantime, you can adjust your location within your profile settings to show when you roll over a member avatar with your mouse.

Much of this feedback has come from your posts within the Community Feedback discussion thread. We do check regularly and often. Thank you again for all your help in making this community better each day.

Release 12 - Aug 06 2019

Hi All Staff & Community Members,

We want to announce new improvements based on your feedback and significant community collaboration. The upgrade this week is specifically focused on personalizing your membership experience and account settings even further.

Sensitive Content

There are a diverse set of members and guests that are active within your community. We welcome all kinds of voices and want to ensure that this site is a place to share opinions in a safe and appropriate way, especially for visitors under the age of 18 years. As such, we have introduced a filter for sensitive images that may not be appropriate for a younger audience or those who choose not to view certain types of image content. As a member you can keep the default settings or go to your account settings preferences to adjust. As a guest or member who wants to view one image at a time, you can always click to "Show Content". We hope this makes the community more active and welcome for all.

Performance & Bug Fixes

As always, we are cleaning up small errors and working on page speed. You can expect this to be ongoing maintenance that just makes the site work better. Enjoy!

If you have any additional comments or questions, please reach out to your site admins for post in the community feedback section. We continue to monitor this discussion thread regularly.

Release 11 - July 30 2019

Hi All Community Members and Staff,

This week’s update features additional improvements based on user feedback and the ongoing collaboration within the community. We are encouraged to see the trial of some of our new profile settings and pages like Showcase, My Discussions and Participated Discussions. These are all ways to contribute and interact with your fellow members and guests. The following are details to take note of with this week’s upgrade.

Get to New Posts Faster

Have you checked out the popular section? It’s well...very popular! We heard feedback that seeing the most popular discussions is good but folks would also like to quickly get to new posts. We’ve made this easier by implementing a drop-down from the popular icon. This should provide options to go straight to popular, new posts or any of the sections within that tab. Let us know what you think!

Highlighting

When highlighting text, we’ve made that more visible both in light and dark mode. Plain and simple.

Performance & Bug Fixes

Your community should be fast and work well. We couldn’t agree more! That’s why we added even more page speed improvements and some general fixes to the alignment of images & avatars. Enjoy!

We continue to monitor posts within the Community Feedback discussion thread regularly if you have questions or feedback. The positive communication and collaboration is what helps us deliver great new features and improvements to you every week!

Release 10 - July 23 2019

Community Members and Staff,

Hi all - Another weekly update from your community support team to tell you about updates to your site platform. These improvements and new features are based on your feedback and we appreciate your ongoing collaboration with us. Like you, we want to continue to see this community thrive and grow! Below are details outlining key items to take note of with this week’s upgrade.

Home Page Improvements

The home page is like the front door to welcome both members and guests to your community. It is always important to make a good first impression and so the technology teams supporting this software have worked to make the home page load faster! This includes optimizing images and data usage across all device types. We hope you enjoy a speedier experience!

Discussion Starter

There is a wealth of information and insights in your community. When following along on a thread sometimes you want to know, “who started this discussion”? This is now indicated within all relevant posts as Discussion Starter. We hope this helps make it easier to contribute, reply and engage with your fellow members.

Uploading Photos

Uploading your photos and creating a showcase is a great way to share your interests and expertise within your community. We’ve made uploading images easier both on the site as well as with supported partners like Tapatalk. Click, snap and upload to your hearts’ content, we can’t wait to see your latest pics!

Thanks to all of you who have provided valuable feedback. We hope you have enjoyed the upgrades and new features we have released weekly. For those of you who have a question, comment or just want to say “Thanks!”, we are monitoring posts within the Community Feedback discussion thread regularly.

Release 9 - July 16 2019

Community Members and Staff,

We aim to provide ongoing improvements and new features as our commitment to this community. Your feedback and suggestions help us to build a plan that works to meet your needs and we are thankful for this collaboration. Below are the details of key things to look out for this week in the upgrade.

Your Profile & Settings Page

Completing your profile page is a great way to let your fellow community members and guests know more about you. This page has had some polish added and a simplified design. Set up a signature, find out about your trophies & reactions and see all your settings in one place. This area of the site is all about YOU! You’ll find these pages in the drop down menu under your avatar in the main menu.

Even More Browser Support

We continue to hear feedback on the need for support and compatibility for older browsers. This week we have improved the site layout and functionality for Internet Explorer 11. Let us know if things are working better for you!

My Discussions & Participated Discussions

By following (previously watching) forums and discussion threads, you can keep tabs on key areas of the community that interest you the most. We’ve also added quick links to discussion threads that you may have started, My Discussions, as well as Participated Discussions. These are discussions that you have contributed to. This is an easy way to keep track of where you are interacting and contributing the most! This information can all be found in the “Following” section.

Please continue to send us your questions in our Community Feedback discussion thread and let us know what you think of the new updates. Your feedback has been extremely important to the continued improvements you see on the site.

Release 8 - July 9 2019

Community Members and Staff,

We hope you are enjoying the new platform and have found value in the new features and software solutions that aim to make the site work better. Thank you for your ongoing feedback as you use the site. As part of our continued efforts to reply and act on your suggestions, the following are some key things to look out for this week in the upgrade.

Find Members Online

This community is a great way to share ideas, learn and meet members with shared interests. To find other members that are online at the same time as you, you can “view all” members and see specifically who is “online”. This is a great way to make connections.

More Browser Support

We recognize that the community uses a variety of browsers to access this site. We’ve been working to improve compatibility for older browsers over the last month and hope this provides a better experience for members overall. Let us know if things are working better for you!

Finding Your Way Around

Change can be hard, we get it. That’s why we’ve launched an online tour to highlight some of the new features and introduce names that you may not be used to. We hope this helps finding, reading, posting and uploading that much easier. It only takes a few seconds to take the tour - join us!

Please continue to send us your questions in our Community Feedback thread discussion and let us know what you think of the new updates. Your opinion matters and feeds directly into our product improvements!

Release 7 - July 2 2019

Site staff and members, thank you for your continued feedback. We aim to offer solutions to improve your community with each release. We have another update for you as part of our continued efforts to respond to and action your comments, ideas, and suggestions. The following are some key things to look out for.

Online

Want to tell your fellow community members that you are online and ready to chat? This setting in your profile will allow you to adjust your avatar appearance If you want to indicate that you are online or control if fellow members can see if you are available. Look for the small green icon below the profile picture.

Reply Now

Find unanswered threads and discussions where fellow community members are looking for replies. Looking for Replies can now be found in the Popular section. This is a great way to jump into conversations about your favorite topics!

Software Foundation

Our goal is to build your community site on a more modern, stable and maintained software platform. XenForo has provided this foundation and your site has now been updated to the latest version 2.1.2. This base will help us to continue to deliver improvements and new features for you moving forward.

Please continue to send us your questions in our Community Feedback thread discussion and let us know what you think of the new updates. Your opinion matters!

Release 6 - June 25 2019

You spoke, We listened. Thank you for all your insightful feedback. We have another update for you this week that we are very excited about and hope will increase your enjoyment of the site. Some key things to look out for in this latest release, as we aim to deliver continuous improvements.

Post Numbers

We have added in clear post numbers beside each post to make it easier to follow a large discussion and quote or link to a particular reply. We hope that participating in your community conversations just got easier!

Find All Staff & Members

Whether you are new to the community or a long time member; it is always nice to connect with fellow enthusiasts and staff that share your interests. Click on view all to get more details on your community.

Image Loading Performance

We have made software enhancements to enable the images to load based on your screen resolution and to reduce the need for data usage on a mobile device. Better images that load faster and easier - just for you!

Please continue to send us your feedback and let us know what you think of the changes, we are constantly looking at ways to improve the community experience for you.

Release 5 - June 18 2019

We have more great updates to share with you this week based on your feedback and the use of your new community platform. Continuous improvements are core to bringing you a reliable and increasingly better site every day. Here are some key things to look out for in this latest release.

Sticky Discussion Threads

Some discussions just need to be read! These are sticky and we heard feedback that sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the sticky discussion threads and the regular discussions. We have updated the design and layout so now sticky discussions have a pin beside the title and a large grey bar at the bottom. We hope this makes it easier to browse the content and find the information that is most important to you as a community member.

View Counts

There were a few areas of the sites where the view counts were not showing consistently. We have addressed the display issue. We hope this helps you find the most read and popular content more easily.

Recent Searches

Our new search service is a great way to find information on the site. Even better, your site will remember your most recent searches to help you find information more quickly. The search bar is always on the top of the site, whenever you need it!

Performance

More performance improvements! Fast loading pages are just better for everyone and we couldn’t agree more. Please continue to send us your feedback and let us know if you see an improvement, we are constantly working on making the site faster and faster.

Your insights are extremely powerful in helping us to support your community better. Please keep them coming!

Release 4 - June 11 2019

In an effort to bring you consistent improvements to your community experience, you will receive update notices from us frequently. These updates are based on continuously supporting the technology that powers your community as well as introducing new and improved features based on your feedback. We have released another platform update today and here are some key things to look out for:

Following

Following a thread is a great way to stay up-to-date on the topic, and receive alerts or emails when there are new replies. Thread subscriptions and watched threads are now called “Followed”. Threads are referred to as “Discussions”. Your followed content can be accessed by clicking on your user avatar, and clicking “Following”. We have improved the performance and added view counts to your followed discussions to better organize your favorites.

New Posts

Looking for the latest posts in the most popular discussions? These are easy to find using the quick link at the top of the page to head over to popular discussions. There is a tab that lists new posts specifically so you can stay on top of “what’s new”.

Dark Mode

We have heard great feedback about our new dark mode. As one of our favorite features, dark mode allows you to access the site with a power-saving and easier on the eyes layout. You can access it through the right-hand drop-down menu. We are continuously improving the readability in this low light state. Let us know what you think!

Performance

We are constantly testing new ways to improve our performance and the speed of the site. Your feedback and experiences help us to diagnose any issues and deliver improvements. We have added to our infrastructure recently to provide more horsepower and there are continued improvements to page performance coming in the next couple of weeks. Please continue to send us your feedback. Your insights are extremely powerful in helping us to support your community better.

Release 3 - June 4 2019

Reaching out to inform you of new features and functionality with the new site software release today! This is part of our ongoing commitment to bring improvements to your community based on your feedback. Here are some things to look out for:

Popular and Following Sections

Hot on the release of improved navigation to the popular threads and following threads sections, we have cleaned up the design to make it easier to read and manage your favorites. We have listened to your feedback on these valuable sections and will continue to launch additional improvements in the coming weeks.

Dark Mode

If you haven’t tried dark mode yet, you can access it through your drop-down menu. We have improved the readability so you can enjoy your community on your computer or mobile device in low light situations. Try it now!

Accessibility

Ensuring that as many folks can access the site and the communities is of the utmost importance. We have improved some of the contrasts within the designs and text, increased button sizes for mobile and improved screen reader functionality to increase accessibility for all.

We look forward to hearing your feedback on the latest improvements.

Release 2 - May 28 2019

We are happy to reach out and let you know about another update to the site software today. Our hope is to provide continuous improvement and respond to your feedback. Here are some things to look out for:

Email Identifiers:

We have updated the email templates with the new site logos so you should always know that the community email communication is safe and legitimate.

Showcase Details:

Your showcase details page design has been updated and should make it easier to view, react and comment on community pictures. If you haven’t started a showcase yet, upload now and start your collection!

Release 1 - May 16 2019

Thank you to all who provided valuable feedback and insights into the new design and layout recently launched. We are excited to announce a new feature release to the platform based on your comments. As promised, we have introduced a new “popular posts” quick link from the menu bar that will help you access the active & trending topics faster, within one click. We hope you like it!

For those of you who like to follow certain topics, we have also introduced a new quick link within your profile drop down menu. This will help you quickly access and sort between your favorite discussions. We hope this makes your experience a little easier and more personalized.

We have also included some bug fixes and improved readability in a few areas to increase your enjoyment of the community. We look forward to delivering more improvements in the coming weeks and appreciate your ongoing participation.